William I. Robinson, Latin America and Global Capitalism: A Critical Globalization Perspective. Johns Hopkins Studies in Globalization. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008, 440 pp. $US 55.00 hardcover (978-0-80189039-0)
William Robinson's goal in Latin America and Global Capitalism is to develop a theory of global capitalism, with Latin America as his empirical referent. Because "transnational or global space is coming to supplant national spaces" (p. 7), he treats this system as if it were a world-nation-state: a global, transnational production system, which has generated both a transnational capitalist class and a transnational state. Resistance and counterhegemonic struggles by "popular classes" must now be waged in the same global terrain, he argues. If a theory of global capitalism is the goal, Robinson's chief achievement is more modest: to synthesize a myriad of polarizing social and economic effects of the neoliberal development model behind the promotion of globalization since the early 1980s.
In view of his globalist perspective, Robinson asserts that "[a] sociology of national development is no longer tenable" (p. 43), even if his own case study about Venezuela is about promoting "endogenous development," supplemented with international solidarity networks. He establishes what I will call a globalist causal priority: local and regional economies and social structures must be studied from their point of insertion into global accumulation. This …
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